Bulgaria's struggle belies promise of EU membership

HARMANLI, Bulgaria — Boris Rangelov, a student protest leader in Bulgaria, has a sobering message for the Ukrainian protesters demanding closer ties to Europe: Change takes a long time.

While the protesters in Ukraine have been out on the streets for a few weeks demanding that a government they see as corrupt and discredited resign, Rangelov has been protesting on and off since February to get rid of his own country's seemingly corrupt political and economic masters.

“We should be in the Guinness Book of World Records,” said Rangelov, a student at Sofia University, the epicenter of a protest movement that ousted a conservative government and now wants the same for its Socialist-led replacement.

Bulgaria's demonstrators have discovered how difficult it can be to bring change, even in a country that has for six years been a member of the European Union, which Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, snubbed in November in favor of deeper ties with Russia.

The endless political deadlock here has fueled deep disillusionment among frustrated Bulgarians who'd hoped that European membership would mean an open road toward a more prosperous, equitable and transparent system. Also, it has given them a more realistic sense of what membership in the union — an option not even on the table yet for Ukraine — can bring.

It also has underscored the seeming powerlessness of the European bloc to leverage its influence in Bulgaria for change.

Meanwhile, Bulgarians and Romanians, whose nations joined the EU in 2007 and who gain the right to work anywhere in it as of Jan. 1, are abandoning their homelands for wealthier corners of the bloc in numbers so large that they're provoking regret among some member nations.

“I never thought my country would be in such a bad situation right now,” said Maglena Kuneva, who, as Bulgaria's minister of European affairs from 2002 to 2005 and then as a senior official in Brussels, negotiated the nation's entry into the EU. “I thought we would go further, better and faster.”

Virtually nobody in Bulgaria thinks EU membership hasn't brought many benefits or that it was a mistake. Still, Bulgaria has remained at the bottom of the EU's poverty tables. This month, Transparency International, a Berlin-based advocacy group, ranked Bulgaria as Europe's most corrupt country after Greece.